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Thursday, 22 January 2015

In the light of the recent
events in France, according to one of our ‘leading’ Anglo-Jewish novelists Howard
Jacobson, “any Jew who is not frightened is mad...”Well, the events of recent weeks - first in
Paris, then the various reactions to them in the Jewish community here in the
UK - have provoked in me various emotions from outrage and compassion to
confusion and cynicism; but I haven’t felt frightened. I have felt though an anxious concern about
what the current swirl of Jewish paranoia- verging-on-hysteria will do to our
sense of ourselves as a community in the months, and maybe years, ahead.

So, I’m not feeling
personally frightened. (Or not more so than my normal ongoing fears about
everything from what ageing might mean for my health, to what the crude
pan-European scapegoating of immigrants might mean for their health and well-being,
to the environmental catastrophe that threatens everyone’s well-being in the
decades ahead). So does this lack of fear mean that I am indeed, as Jacobson
insists, ‘mad’? Mad not to feel frightened by the nihilistic grudge-bearing
murderousness of pockets of Islamist publicity-seeking martyrs-in-waiting? Mad
not to fear some inevitable outrage in the UK, in spite of all the sterling
work the police and intelligence services are obviously doing to track these
disaffected youths caught up in these Islamist death cults?

It’s not that I think it is
delusional to think an attack could happen – it could, of course – but does
that mean I have to avoid taking public transport, or walking around the
streets of North London, or avoid recognisable Jewish buildings or shops? or
only do so in a state of perpetual fear? I feel sorry for those who are feeling
afraid –I can sympathise with such
fearfulness, but I don’t find I have very much, if any, empathy for it: empathy
in the sense of sharing the feelings being expressed. I find myself thinking of Nachman of
Bratzlav’s wisdom: ‘The whole world is a very narrow bridge – but the essential
thing is not to be afraid, at all’. A tall order, that ‘at all’, but a salutary
one.

That 'very narrow bridge' speaks to the fact that life is inherently uncertain, it's immersed in unpredictability. Tragedies can – and do – strike us without warning and in spite of all the precautions and insurances we take out in our vain attempts to feel in control. Am I ‘mad’ in our current
climate to refuse to be dominated by fear, ruled by fear, held emotional
hostage to fantasies of aggression directed towards me from unknown assailants?
That way does madness lie, I would suggest, rather than it being ‘mad’ not to
feel it.

Am I mad to think that – in
President Roosevelt’s resonant phrase at his 1933 Inauguration - ‘We have
nothing to fear but fear itself’? Am I mad not to take seriously some spurious
survey that suggests that 45% of British Jews believe Jews may not have a long
term future in the UK? Jacobson says that after the killings in Paris his
feeling was of ‘cold fingers at your heart...dread’. (Cold fingers at your
heart, Howard ? Mixed metaphor, surely, – but maybe that’s what fear does, it
scrambles your thinking).

An inner chill is what I do feel
when I read the Jewish Chronicle whipping up the anxiety levels in our
community, because I dread our becoming a community that acts as if we are
under siege, and I loathe the mentality of ‘they are all out to get us’, and I
dread the contagious nature of fear when it is stirred up by communal
institutions or the Community Security Trust (who are having a field day). The
visible extra security on display – this ratcheting up of overt ‘protection’ –
is actually stimulating the fear it is meant to allay.

And I feel some of those cold
fingers reaching out to grip me when I see our Home Secretary Theresa May, and
our Secretary of State for Communities Eric Pickles, solemnly holding up
placards saying ‘Je Suis Juif’. The cynic in me says there’s an element here of
pre-election courting of Jewish votes – it’s good politics to put on a show of
concern about our concern. But there is something fundamentally askew – though maybe
absurd would be a better word - about those placards. ‘No, you’re not’, I want
to say, ‘and I don’t want you to be’. I wonder if the placards they held had
said ‘I am a Jew’, would more Jews have seen through it? Or at least questioned what was
going on?

The issue we face within the
UK is about working with differences
between peoples and faiths, about finding ways to live together: native born
and immigrant, Muslim and Jew and Christian, many cultures, many faiths, many
ethnicities, all the complex multiplicity of identities that citizens inhabit.
It’s not about merging differences, pretending we are all the same. That ‘Je
Suis Juif’ act of pseudo-identification may seem well-meant – but it is
conceptually flawed. I found that acted-out show of solidarity rather nauseating.
Maddening. But then after all, according to Jacobson, I am just ‘mad’ anyway.

Thursday, 15 January 2015

I felt a
degree of concern when I heard that this week’s edition of Charlie Hebdo would
once again feature a cartoon of the prophet Mohammed. Was this to be a further
provocation, a gesture of angry defiance, another barb aimed at the heart of
Muslim sensibilities?

I have spent
the last week reflecting on the almost impossible balance that needs to be
maintained between our hard-foughtfreedoms for literary and artistic self-expression – which includes the
freedom to subvert conventional pieties (religious or secular), the freedom to
dissent against majority opinions or those of the powerful (secular or
religious) through polemic, satire, drama, whatever non-violent weapons are at
hand – and the desirability on a human level of avoiding unnecessary distress
to those one is opposing.

Empathy
towards another person’s (or group’s) sensitivities is a noble quality. Seeing
the world through the eyes of others is meant to help us towards a larger
vision of the human, a more refined understanding of our shared (but multifarious)
humanity. But if you believe the other’s world-view is detrimental to your well-being,
how best to convey one’s hurt, or one’s outrage, without provoking their hurt,
or outrage, in response? Is it possible to profoundly challenge another’s view
of the world while maintaining an attitude of respect for the integrity of the
other’s view? What if the other is a believer in slavery? Or an anti-Semite? Or
a misogynist? Or a dyed-in-the-wool racist? This dilemma is complex enough when
we are talking about individual relationships – me and you. But when we are
talking about group sensibilities the difficulties multiply exponentially.

All of these
thoughts have been in play as I have pondered on the events of this tumultuous
week. ‘Group think’ has been everywhere: it was in the massed crowds showing
solidarity with the victims of the tragedies in Paris; and it was in the
well-meaning and I am sure heartfelt ‘not in my name – this is not Islam’
responses of the majority of Western Muslims to their co-religionists’
outrages. But was I alone in feeling uncomfortable at the role played this week
by the Prime Minister of the State of Israel in the events in Paris? Solidarity
with French Jews, OK. But playing so prominently the ‘You can always come to
Israel’ card to a shocked and grieving diaspora community – as if they didn’t
know this? - seemed insensitive rather than supportive: a piece of political rhetoric
compounded by the strange nationalisticappropriation
of those who died in the supermarket.

Why were their funerals – and not the two
Jews who died in the Charlie Hebdo attack - in Jerusalem? Were the supermarket
victims all ex-pat Israelis? I don’t think they were. I don’t think any of them were - but what they
shared was that they died in a ‘Jewish’ supermarket. So Israel claimed them. (It
was left to Israel’s President, Reuven Rivlin – not for the first time in
recent months - to provide, en passant,
the necessary rebuke to Netanyahu: Jews should come to Israel , he said, not
out of fear, but ‘We want you to chose Israel because of a love for Israel’).

If the four who died in the supermarket weren’t Israelis,
then what we saw so prominently exhibited to the world was a problematic elision
by Netanyahu of the distinction between Jew and Israeli. We rightly complain
when diaspora Jews are attacked or abused because of the actions of the State
of Israel – but these funerals fed right
in to the more-common-than-we-like-to-think non-Jewish failure to distinguish
between diasporic Jewry and the Israeli state. It played straight into the homogenising
group think that says all Jews, wherever they live in the world, are the same.
A mirror image of the unthinking anti-Muslim polemic that pontificates that ‘all Muslims’ are deluded fanatics – or terrorists
in waiting.

Back to the
cartoon. One of the dominant motifs over this last week has been the much
voiced Muslim response that the hallmark of Mohammed was his empathy, his
patience, his tolerance, his gentleness – his
capacity to forgive:We should, through our actions and deeds,
display the sublime character of the Prophet (peace be upon him). The Prophet
faced many great challenges but he exhibited impeccable beauty of character in
his actions. He did not react inhumanely or violently. He was attacked verbally
and physically in Taif but he forgave the people. His uncle and companions were
murdered but he reacted peacefully and in a humane manner. And there are many
such examples from the life of the Prophet (peace be upon him) we must display (see the
statement by leading imams at https://www.facebook.com/JosephInterfaithFoundation).

So I found
it rather moving – and exhibiting a touch of inspiration – for the figure on
the cover to be tearful, empathising with the victims, and to appear below the
headline ‘Everything is Forgiven’. It is a response both profoundly religious
and profoundly humanistic: it fuses religiosity and secularism in a powerful
vision of shared human values. Rénald Luzier – ‘Luz’ – has created a timeless image
that both subverts the stale boundaries between what is ‘religious’ and what is
‘secular’ – and belies the proud, self-confessed atheistic stance of the
journal’s editorial board. The image offers us a reflection on the role of
compassion and forgiveness in the face of fear and terror and death.

Yes, it does
this through an image of a bearded man in a turban – and no doubt many will
project the notion of the Prophet Mohammed onto this picture. But it is no more
a representation of the reality of the Prophet whom Muslims reverence than are those
analogous imaginative gestures towards a shared cultural reference point found
in the dozens of images of ‘God’ drawn by cartoonists for the New Yorkerover the last several decades. It is a sort of
category error to confuse the image with what it points towards.

Cartoons are not
icons: eastern Orthodoxy created devotional objects for Christian meditation – spending
time reflecting on the image of Christ could lead to a greater sense of piety,
of the need to mirror the attributes of the Christ figure in one’s daily life. And western art is of course unthinkable
without its religious imagery – though representations of God are rare. It is
strange perhaps that Islam has borrowed the Judaeo-Christian tradition of not
representing God and extended it to the Prophet – this extension of the
prohibition about image making is like the Judaic ‘fence around the Torah’, an
additional circle of protectiveness lest one stray too near what the core
prohibition is: idolatry. The problem always comes when a religious tradition
makes an idol out of the law designed to keep one from making idols. And we are
not to make idols out of divinity/God in any monotheistic tradition because, as
it is said, Allah Hu-akbar – ‘God’ is
greater/bigger/more incomprehensible than any image can ever capture.

But one of the things I have learnt this week has
been that there was a longstanding tradition of Islamic artistic representation
of the Prophet. One 16th century example, of Mohammed on Mt Hira, with a veiled face and halo, can be seen in the link below (scroll down, right hand side image) :

This
tradition of figurative representation of Mohammed may have fallen out of
fashion – and be unknown to adherents of Islam. But ignorance of one’s own
multi-dimensionalfaith tradition is not
of course restricted to Islam. And of course cartoons are not usually
devotional material.

But Luz’s
front cover does allow us to contemplate some of the core values of Islam, Judaism
and Christianity as well as humanism: our capacity for regret, empathy,
forgiveness, compassion. It leaves open the question who is doing the
forgiving, and who is being forgiven. If the cover is an act of defiance – though
I’m not so sure it is – then it is the defiance of the sorrowful: not an act of aggression but an act of
humility, of hurt, of vulnerability, of solidarity with those who suffer. And
which of us does not suffer in these days of turmoil and fear?

Thursday, 8 January 2015

In 1821 the English poet Shelley
wrote a critical essay, ‘In Defence of Poetry’, in which he argued that the
value of poetry was that it acts on us in a way that "awakens
and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand
unapprehended combinations of thought".This is what the written word – and satirical cartoons - can do for us. And
to us. His essay ends with the well-known Romantic thought that “poets are the
unacknowledged legislators of the world”. Religious texts too can ‘awaken and
enlarge the mind’ – and when read in a certain spirit they do, be they Jewish,
Muslim or Christian texts - but they can
also deaden and shrink the mind. The problem is not (usually) the texts
themselves – the problem resides in those who read them.

Today’s murders in Paris are an attack on the freedom of
all writers, all artists, to express themselves in ways that might offend
others. I share the general sense of outrage, shock and horrified condemnation:
it is an attack that goes to the heart of what we think of as ‘civilized’
values. But when what we hold sacred is attacked, or mocked, what can we do?
This is not straightforward. When DerStürmer published its articles and cartoons attacking Jews and Judaism in Germany
in the 1930s, Jews did not take up arms to kill the offenders. But should they
have done? Would we have wanted them to?

The offices of Charlie Hebdo were
firebombed in 2011 – anti-Muslim polemic has been part of their repertoire for
a decade: they republished the Danish cartoons in 2006 that had caused much
upset in the Muslim community. They are provocatively anti-authoritarian and
anti-religious. Possibly some of the magazine’s content would not have been
permissible in the UK, where we have the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act
of 1994, Section 4A of which states: (1) A person is guilty of an offence if, with intent to cause a person
harassment, alarm or distress, he— (a) uses threatening, abusive or insulting
words or behaviour...or (b) displays any writing, sign or other visible
representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting, thereby causing that
or another person harassment, alarm or distress. In 2012, following a
vigorous campaign, this Act was amended and the word “insulting” was removed.

However this legislation needs to be read in conjunction with the UK’s Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006which makes it a crime to stir up
religious hatred - but protects freedom of speech by stating that the act does
not ‘prohibit or restrict discussion,
criticism or expressions of antipathy, dislike, ridicule, insult or abuse of
particular religions or the beliefs or practices of their adherents...’

The idea is prevalent that I can or should protect you from feeling ‘offended’
– but this, along with the notion that I should be protected (by the law, if
necessary) from feeling offended – makes
no sense. I feel offended by the government’s callous sado-monetarist austerity
programmes; I feel offended by the anti-immigrant rhetoric of large parts of
the press; I feel offended by many, many things I encounter every day – too many
to list, but if you are sensate you will have your own list – but I also
recognise that it is my own responsibility to channel these feelings, as best
as possible, in ways that aren’t lethal to others. This too is not straightforward,
psychologically, spiritually. But it is close to the heart of what it means to
be a moral being. Yet it is a task, and not a given.

This latest outrage brings to mind the murderous response to Salman Rushdie’s
The Satanic Verses (1988) – Ayatollah Khomenei’s fatwa called for his assassination; his Japanese translator was
murdered, his Italian translator seriously stabbed, his Norwegian translator
shot, the offices of his Indian publishers were threatened, and the fatwa remains
in force even though Rushdie has come out of hiding.

This is what happens when religious texts and religious traditions are
related to literally as absolute vehicles for higher truth – rather than as
vehicles for the human spirit’s poetic sensibility. When they become idols,
rather than imaginative containers for a ‘thousand unapprehended combinations
of thought’.

The debate about what the limits of free speech might be in our contemporary
world will go on. Meanwhile we mourn those who have lost their lives so
senselessly in (and outside) the offices of a Parisian magazine that wished to
provoke but could not imagine the power of hatred their texts could unleash.